Abolishing The Ed Dept. Is Just The First Step In Fixing Schools

Last week, Donald Trump nominated Linda McMahon, co-founder of the World Wrestling Entertainment company, the head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, and two-time nominee for the U.S. Senate, as his secretary of education. 

While Democrat critics will deride McMahon’s lack of education experience, many conservatives will see this as her greatest asset. Unlike current Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, an equity-obsessed educrat from Connecticut, McMahon will approach her duty with the necessary pragmatism and detachment that true reform requires. Like any successful businesswoman, she will find solutions, not excuses, for the rising costs and declining performance that have plagued American K-12 government schools for decades.

As Trump has said on numerous occasions, the ultimate hope is that McMahon will be the last secretary of education and work to eliminate the Department of Education altogether. He and many others believe this will help end the leftist indoctrination happening in schools, restore parental rights, weaken teachers unions, and save the federal government a few hundred billion dollars each year. 

While all this sounds very nice, speaking as a high school English teacher who has worked in this system for nearly two decades, this rationale fundamentally misunderstands what the DOE does and doesn’t do.

First and foremost, the DOE mainly cuts checks for schools that serve poorer students, certain special education programs, and bogus education studies that no one reads. It doesn’t officially create curricula or mandate any pedagogical or disciplinary approaches, nor does it have much to do with national standardized tests, which are handled by a third party. For this reason, it’s better to see the DOE as more of a welfare program than an educational one.

That said, the DOE has overstepped its authority in the past decade by using federal funds to force states to use Common Core curriculum. At the same time, Barack Obama used the department to send out “guidelines” for school discipline that let countless delinquents off the hook in the name of equity. Schools that rejected these guidelines faced punitive investigations and threats of lawsuits. 

While most people have stopped paying attention to these controversies, they still create headaches for educators. Common Core has largely been accepted by most states — even if it goes by different names now — and there is still a push to reduce punishments for misbehavior, particularly for nonwhite students. Indeed, reversing these ridiculous policies that have dumbed down most classrooms and made them unsafe and chaotic would be the best thing someone like McMahon could do.

Outside of this, however, the influence of the DOE’s absence would be limited. Public education is mostly controlled by state and local governments along with district school boards and administrators. Even if these officials could finally raise academic and behavioral standards without fear of losing funding or being sued, most of them, even in conservative areas, have an interest in maintaining the status quo. After all, what are unhappy parents going to do? Leave?

If a state sets up a school choice program that gives parents different options for schooling, then yes, they can leave. If not, then non-wealthy parents will simply have to deal with the neighborhood public school that has little incentive to change anything. These mediocre schools may produce students who can’t read, do basic math, or even function as independent adults, but they receive their money all the same, and they can always rely on Democrats and establishment Republicans to vote on ever more funding.

More importantly, all these decisions are made by those who either have no experience in the classroom or have been out of the classroom for many years. They are the ones who think it would be a good idea to put gay pornography in school libraries, facilitate transgender transitions for depressed adolescents, and shut down “gifted and talented” programs to close racial achievement gaps. For all the talk of “stakeholders” in public education, those of us with a personal stake — students, parents, and teachers — are inevitably forced to do our best in an inherently dysfunctional system.

All of which is to say that getting rid of the DOE or at least diminishing its role would only be the first step. The next, much harder step would be voting for politicians and policies that would implement school vouchers for students, merit pay for teachers, expanded school accreditation, and much more standardized testing to hold educational institutions accountable. 

Not only would this incentivize schools to compete with one another for enrollment, but it would also incentivize decentralization in American school systems, giving more say to teachers and parents. Instead of massive one-size-fits-all districts, campuses, and classrooms, K-12 schools would be smaller, more specialized, and tailored to specific educational needs. Instead of the bureaucratic bloat, incompetence, and corporate anonymity that characterizes most faculties, there would be far more efficient, talented, and close-knit communities of educators with a shared mission.

All of this will necessarily be part of a process that goes beyond a new DOE appointee making a few changes in federal policy. It will take all Americans to follow Trump’s lead and do their part to bring down the educational leviathan in their states and cities. It may be daunting, but it’s possible and certainly worth doing. 

Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He is the founding editor of The Everyman, a senior contributor to The Federalist, and has written essays for Newsweek, The American Mind, The American Conservative, Religion and Liberty, Crisis Magazine, and elsewhere. Follow him on X and Substack.